So I promised to blog when the code for this is available but I obviously forgot to do so. It hit svn a while ago. Get it with:
"svn co http://developer.imendio.com/svn/gnome-launch-box/trunk gnome-launch-box"
Start with it "gnome-launch-box -t" combined with a running composite manager for the real sweetness.

So after the headaches I had after doing some more GnomeVFS ACL work (more about that next week) I wanted to do something cool. Inspired by the deskbar applet I remembered that there was GNOME Launch Box. I checked out the lasted version from Imendio's svn and I was very pleased to see that it has gotten really stable, but the pseudo transparency was gone. :( So I though that would be the perfect "cool" thing I could do. A bit of Cairo learning, tons of source reading and a few gtk/gdk I had never heared of later I have it ready! Tada! First try and the fancy Final version of GNOME Launch Box with real transparency powered by XComposite. Hope you like it - I do. I am still shaping up the code so it can handle non transparent cases nicely as well but I am confident that I will be ready by mid-next week. I am going to continue hacking on it ... maybe we can have it in Gnome 2.14? :) By the way .. coding with Cairo is real fun.

Schrödinger's cat and OpenGL
So I had the feeling that I didn't learn any new stuff in the Computer Science field for a long long time. At the beginning of this semester I had the very strong feeling that this had to change. I though learning OpenGL so I could help Soeren putting cool new eye candy in metacity (and the rest of the desktop) would be a good new "thing". So I ordered the famous redbook 2 weeks ago and I already made some good progress. And you know what? Doing all that linear algebra is real fun. I kinda missed that. Really. Scary at the same time!

I have 5 philosophy classes this semester including ones about political philosophy of early modern times (Hobbes, Lock, Rousseau), asian philosophy (buddhism, daoism, ...), economics and ethic, Nietzsche (ohh you gotta love him ...) and last but not least relativism (inspired by our all pope's critics of relativism). Everything very interesting. It's a bit scary how many things I learned in school about Hobbes and Co. were just wrong or at least half true. Oh well. Much reading ...

Ohh and this picture of Schrödinger's cat made me laught a long time. :)

Back to the Future
I am back from my 3 week vacation to Indonesia. It was a great time although it was totally diffrent the then last time (more exhausting but also more eye-opening).
I am trying to get myself into full gears now, so I can get gnome-vfs some lovage, but I fear it might take some days. The photos of the trip are here.
Oh well, after 11 weeks of traveling, it's damn good to be home and I am so looking forward to going to University tomorrow.

PhotosI finally have most of my photos imported into F-Spot. Despite the small annoyance that some of my photos aren't inserted with the right date so they appear in middle of a totally different set everything is just perfect. I love this application! After that was done I decided it's time to put some of my photos online and I figured flickr would be the easiest way to do that. So I started operation "Share the photos" with the ones from Burning Man. I added a link to them from my homepage: Christian Kellner's Braindump.

Our little Gnome 2.12 Release Party was pretty nice. Thanks again Travis for organizing. It also was good to see ChipX86 again. We also made a little group photo with Rachel's HipTop but it a *bit* blurry.

[Update] On a sidenote: As you can see on the pictures my hair is not as long anymore as it is on my hackergotchi.

Burn baby, burn!
Burning Man was awesome! So many nice and friendly people there. The idea that you can't buy stuff, all the different art out on the Playa and not to forget the amazing parties during the nights made it really an unique experince. All that glowing during the night. Wow. I gotta post some pictures I made although I didn't shoot too many because I didn't want to carry the camera around all the time. I wonder if people would stay that friendly over a longer period of time. I am not sure but I guess not :P Well I am glad they all did for this week at least. :)Party on, Wayne!
Apropos party. We decided we have to have a Silicon Valley Gnome 2.12 Release Party. Travis Reitter started organizing this and and we thought that this Wednesday around 7:00pm at the Cheescake Factory in Palo Alto would be the right time and location. Every Gnome lover is invited! If you wanna show up it would be nice to let him now (the email address is on the Gnome 2.12 Party page - thanks Fer for doing one again) but I guess it is also fine if you just come. The more the merrier!

Get it while it's hot
So in cooperation with Dave 'metal' Camp Inc. I'll bring you the first release of Evolution-CalDAV, the ueber-cool protocol that hip calendaring server speak these days (or will speak :). It should work pretty well with Dave's CalDAV server, which is totally sexy C# code, and you all should look at it and eventually give it a spin. The connector is, like the server, not 100% complete and big parts are missing (e.g. some of timezone logic, offline write support and scheduling). Jürg Billeter was the first one to sent me a patch for it. You can join the circle and prove to be as hip as Jürg and add some of the missing parts. Patches and bug reports are more then welcome and go into the Evolution-CalDAV product on bugzilla.gnome.org. It will be merged into main evolution some time but for now it will be a separate module so people can play with it more easily.
Anyways I am leaving for Burning Man in less then 4 hours and have to catch some sleep before that NOW.

Burn the Man
I have seen pictures taken by my temporary roomate Joe from the 2004 Burning Man last week and decided that I *have* go there. So I called this bus travel agency last week to ask if they got a place on the bus left and they really had! So after some shopping in "the North Face" shop and Fry's, I have my sleepingback, waterbottels and whatnot needed for this trip. I have spent some good $$$ but I am now totally ready to leave on Wednesday morning. It's going to take the whole day to get the Bus from San Francisco to Black Rock City but I don't mind seeing a bit of the country since I normally spent most of the time in the Scalix office building. They have proven to be a real cool,hip company for letting me go during the week. Rocking! If anybody of you guys are going please let me know so we can meet up there. :)

Google Talk
So I am going to hop on this bus and also post my google mail addy here so people that like to can add me: kellner@gmail.com. Using jabber for this rocks and I hope that the voice part will work soon.GnomeVFS
One little sidenote: I released GnomeVFS 2.11.92 yesterday night (1:00 am for me). I spent like 2.5 hours to fix sftp symlinks for that release but I figured that I should do it in a more cleaner way, so it is not in that release, but I promise it will be in the 2.12 :)